The latest mortgage lender sentiment survey from Fannie Mae finds that industry leaders are paying increasing attention to enhancing the borrower experience, thanks to competitive market pressures. To what degree they can actually pull that off remains to be seen. Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist for the government-sponsored enterprise, noted in an online post that the company’s previous survey found that senior mortgage executives were worried ...
Mortgage lenders harvested a landmark crop of purchase-money mortgages during the second quarter, fueled partly by continuing growth in the first-time buyer segment, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. An estimated $307.0 billion of purchase loans were originated in the second quarter, up a stunning 49.8 percent from the first three months of the year. That was the highest quarterly volume for purchase-mortgage lending since the third quarter of 2006. Purchase loans accounted for 67.5 percent of the estimated $455.0 billion in first-lien mortgage originations during the April-June cycle, the highest such share since at least 2003. First-time buyers contributed...[Includes three data tables]
Lenders and servicers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages notched a big win in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which found that a federal bar on foreclosure on government-sponsored enterprise loans preempted Nevada’s superiority lien law. As a published decision, the court’s ruling in Berezovsky v. Moniz resolves the dispute in favor of the federal foreclosure bar, according to Marc James Ayers and R. Aaron Chastain, attorneys with Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. It serves as a binding precedent in the Ninth Circuit and should guide other circuits in deciding cases involving homeowners associations’ super-priority liens, they said. In Berezovsky, the panel affirmed...
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